Dr Michael McAfee

Dr. Michael McAfee, is President and CEO of PolicyLink, a national research and action organization dedicated to advancing racial and economic equity by Lifting Up What Works®.

He has spent more than 20 years serving as a results-driven leader in the government, philanthropic, and human-service sectors. He has partnered with community leaders to build 3,000 units of affordable housing, create 5,000 jobs, and provide hundreds of thousands of children and their families with the educational and community supports they need to thrive. Most recently, he was one of the catalysts for ground-breaking research that highlights the corporate advantage of racial equity in America. The research showed that opportunities to create shared value by promoting racial equity occur at every point along a company’s value chain—from hiring, training, and advancing employees, to procurement, product design, and marketing, even including the company’s ownership and governance structure and its lobbying and philanthropy.

Additionally, he’s played a leadership role in investing $1 billion dollars in neighborhoods across America in order to transform them into communities of opportunity for children and their families. This ground-breaking work resulted in the Promise Neighborhoods program becoming a permanent federal program through the 2015 authorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

An avid practitioner of Bikram Yoga and an off-road hiking, Dr. McAfee is on a journey to build a legacy grounded in equity – just and fair inclusion into a society in which all are fully participating, prospering and reaching their full potential.